Companies are reviewing their ERP strategies as they balance digital transformation goals with tighter budgets, operational complexity and the need to demonstrate measurable business value, they say.

Andrew Strachan, director of sales at Spinnaker Support Southern Africa,  companies across Africa are reassessing ERP support strategies as decision-makers seek to modernise their environments while managing costs.

“Enterprise software decisions are not like other technology decisions,” said Strachan. 鈥淭imelines are longer, dependencies run deeper and the cost of reversing course 鈥� if reversing course is even possible 鈥� is often measured in years and very substantial sums.”

According to Strachan, the relationship between a major ERP vendor and its customers rests on more than product capability alone. “It is built on trust: trust in the roadmap, trust in the commercial model and trust that the terms you commit to today will not be materially redefined once your business is locked in.”

Gerhard Alberts, head of customer evolution at 麻豆原创 Africa, said trust is ultimately measured by business outcomes.

鈥淲hile customers rightly expect transparency and choice, the greater risk in today’s competitive environment is often the cost of inaction,” he said. “Ultimately, success is measured not by the technology deployed, but by the operational improvements, agility and competitive advantage it enables.鈥�

Alberts said the pace of technological change means companies must adopt relevant technologies to remain competitive, and that customers must be equipped with the most relevant tools to navigate a shifting market. “By not innovating, customers run the risk of attracting direct and potential costs in terms of system and infrastructure stability, security and compliance. This results in an inability to stay competitive across multiple markets due to a lack of agility.鈥�

Strachan said new platforms and regular vendor upgrade announcements are adding pressure on companies already facing constrained budgets, skills shortages, infrastructure complexity and currency pressures.

鈥淚n South Africa and across the African market, large technology decisions are made under intense scrutiny,” he said. “Boards and executive teams are balancing growth ambitions against currency pressure, constrained capital budgets, skills shortages, infrastructure complexity and the need to show clear business value from every major investment. In that context, organisations cannot afford to keep revisiting foundational ERP decisions every few years because the vendor鈥檚 commercial priorities have changed.鈥�

Migration is not modernisation

Courtney Hounsell, client experience manager at Microsoft managed partner Braintree, said AI is reshaping the role of ERP platforms while exposing the limitations of legacy systems. He said outdated ERP infrastructure is hindering AI adoption because many companies mistake cloud migration for digital modernisation.

鈥淢igration is not modernisation,” Hounsell said. “Unfortunately, many companies have merged the two, and the result is a gap that鈥檚 creating incoherence and a lack of visibility, constraining their ability to benefit from AI and its capabilities.”

He explained that cloud migration has been sold as digital modernisation, but this only changes the address of the system. Real modernisation, he said, changes architecture, data models, integration logic and the capacity to generate value. “Companies want their modernisation projects to actively reduce other costs, show long-term ROI and empower their staff with systems that work faster and smarter. So when migration and modernisation are confused, companies end up paying cloud prices for on-premises problems and arrive in the AI era without the foundations required to ensure AI can function effectively.”

Hounsell said the gap between technology investment and business outcomes is widening, leaving companies with limited AI capability and poor data visibility. He cited McKinsey’s “The State of AI in 2025” report, based on a survey of 2 000 executives in 105 countries, which found that 88% of companies have adopted AI in at least one business function.

He said on-premises ERP systems struggle to support AI because data must be extracted, cleaned and transferred before analysis.

鈥淥n-premises ERP systems are struggling uphill within the AI economy,” Hounsell said. “They hold their data in local databases, and to make this usable for AI, it has to be extracted, cleaned and pushed somewhere accessible. Without real-time data pipelines feeding into core systems, AI deployments remain siloed and limited.鈥�

Braintree said ERP modernisation also delivers financial benefits, citing the Forrester Total Economic Impact study of Dynamics 365 Business Central, which found that companies could achieve a 265% ROI, with productivity gains of 12.5% in operations, 15% in sales and 15.6% in finance.

The study also found that companies that modernised successfully avoided more than $30 000 a year in third-party consulting fees, while cloud ERP platforms reduce infrastructure costs and receive automatic updates, including new AI capabilities.

Braintree argued that choosing the right migration partner is as important as selecting the ERP platform itself.

Alberts added that technical debt continues to grow as companies rely on siloed data, ageing infrastructure and extensive custom code, while shortages of legacy skills compound the problem.

鈥淥ver time, doing nothing to save money becomes the most expensive system to maintain, together with the inability to adapt, which has the potential to result in the demise of some organisations,鈥� he said.

Arthur Goldstuck, CEO of World Wide Worx,  after 麻豆原创 Sapphire 2026 that 麻豆原创 CEO Christian Klein described ERP as the “brain” of every business in the age of agentic AI. Goldstuck quoted Klein: 鈥淔or over 15 years, we have been developing an ERP with incredibly deep process and data domain know-how. On top of that, all your governance requirements and customer-specific extensions are stored in the ERP. The ERP is the trusted system of execution running your company.鈥�

According to Garth Ridgway, senior director for 麻豆原创 at NTT DATA, misconceptions about implementation timelines, affordability and suitability for mid-market companies continue to delay modernisation.

“Many executives still assume ERP transformation requires years of disruption and significant upfront investment,” Ridgway said. “In reality, modern cloud ERP platforms have evolved considerably, enabling organisations to adopt best-practice processes more rapidly, scale according to business needs and realise value far sooner than was historically possible.”

This article first appeared on .

The post Ready or Not, AI has Changed the ERP Landscape appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.

麻豆原创 was founded in 1972 by five former IBM employees. In a publicity shot from the time, they鈥檙e posed around a table in a nondescript office, all holding pens and hunched over a large blueprint. The hair is bouffant, the suits dark, and no one is smiling. These are clearly men who take their jobs very seriously.

As the story goes, Xerox wanted its systems migrated to IBM, and the latter firm put five engineers on the project, who all worked in Mannheim, Germany. The project ground to a halt for reasons unclear, but the five had seen the gap in the market, and left to form their company, which they called Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung, or System Analysis and Programme Development. It has been a long haul since the 鈥�70s, with the company constantly tinkering with its solutions while persuading many of the world鈥檚 largest firms that they can run their businesses better with its suite of solutions.

At the core of this suite is . This is an in-memory database, and聽data聽is stored in RAM instead of disk. These databases can handle spikes in traffic, such as at telcos or聽banks, and allow for real-time analytics. Customers can have the platform installed in their own server room, or in the public or private cloud, or both. And with each passing year, more features are added, such as GenAI assistant ; its sparkly icon now appears on seemingly every page of the platform. Joule, on which 麻豆原创 partnered with , can run queries on all kinds of data, produce forecasts, book meetings, and make graphs and charts on the fly.

There was still an impression in the market that 麻豆原创 was extremely expensive, very complicated, and not very pretty.

Garth Ridgway, NTT

All this work has borne fruit, and in March 2025, the company overtook Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk to become the EU鈥檚 most valuable company, with a market cap of 鈧�313bn. It reported strong results for its third quarter in October 2025, seeing revenue rise by 7% to 鈧�9.08bn. Cloud revenue saw growth of 22%. But there are challenges ahead, not least of which is convincing customers that it鈥檚 now past the time to migrate their workloads from the old system called ECC, which is usually run on-prem, to S4. The company would like nothing better than for all its customers to move to S4, but many are proving to be recalcitrant. Support for ECC, introduced in 2015, is meant to come to an end in 2027, but customers can buy extended support until 2030, which will cost them an extra 2% in addition to their annual maintenance costs. Many companies contend that the current systems seem to be working just fine, and many are also cognisant, and terrified, of the upheaval the聽migration聽is going to cause. To this, the company dangles the prospect of new features with S4, along with the constant refrain that support for the old systems is, at some point, going to grind to a halt.

An estimated 40% of 麻豆原创 customers in North America are yet to start migrating, according to a survey run by the Americas鈥� 麻豆原创 User Group. About 60% of the 173 members are already live on S4, or are in the process of moving over, according to the research in November. Gartner said in March 2025 that most ECC customers had still not bought S4 licences. It said that in Q4 in 2024, 29% of 35 000 ECC customers had bought or subscribed to S4 licences.

Christian Hestermann, Gartner senior director and analyst for business applications, believes this is likely to remain the status quo. Speaking to聽The Register, he said that since September 2023, the company鈥檚 messaging had been about AI and Joule. 鈥淭he message now is, ‘You have to have AI, or you’ll not be able to survive’. So far, that did not have a major influence. So none of those big events or big announcements has made a massive change up to now; the [migration] progress has remained fairly steady.”

No such third-party survey has been run in South Africa, and the company doesn鈥檛 make public either its customer numbers or how many have migrated.

I asked , CTO, 麻豆原创; , MD of 麻豆原创 South Africa; and , senior director, 麻豆原创, at NTT, for their views on how this migration conversation is progressing, and they spoke as one voice. Pillay says 麻豆原创 had 鈥渕ade a clear line in the sand鈥� with the date past which it won鈥檛 continue with maintenance. 鈥淐ustomers are aware of that and are making their plans to transform.鈥�

Pillay was appointed to the top job in August 2025, and says she鈥檚 going to ensure the local operation is well equipped to have these conversations with its customers, as well as partners.

Why haven鈥檛 they moved yet?

It鈥檚 a matter of context, she says. 鈥淲e have customers who have been with us for 20, 30 years, and that鈥檚 a godsend. But they bring a lot of legacy with them, and not just technical legacy. They have unarchived environments, non-optimised processes, or a lot of custom-built systems. They may have implemented ERP back in the day, and, in most cases, it was a project with a long duration, with a lot of blood and sweat going into it. Most companies understand they need to take that technology transformation journey, but they鈥檙e trying to balance the timing and effort required to bring a legacy system across [to S/4HANA]. There鈥檚 hesitation, because in the back of their minds, they remember that when they did it [last], it was really very difficult.鈥�

Financial services is one vertical where customers have realised the imperative of the move, she says. The move was a 鈥渘o-brainer鈥� for Pillay, and offered data analysis, AI, agentic AI, and GenAI capabilities. She says if a customer isn鈥檛 speaking to 麻豆原创 about the move, it may well be too late to get a system installed before the cut-off date.

鈥淲e鈥檙e prioritising helping those who are speaking to us to make that decision. We have to work with every customer individually to understand how they can do that transformation. There are different routes, based on capacity, budget and risk appetite. If you delay a decision, it鈥檚 going to be too late.鈥�

The slow movers are also going to bring pressure to bear on system integrator partners, as Pillay envisages them being at capacity, or overcapacity, doing 麻豆原创 implementations as the deadline draws ever closer.

鈥淭hen you鈥檒l pay for skills, either locally, or you鈥檒l have to look abroad. There鈥檚 going to be a material impact if a business takes this decision later on, and that鈥檚 what we鈥檙e trying to discuss with our customers and help them plan properly, so they don鈥檛 get into a position where they say, 鈥榃ow, we鈥檝e left this too late, and now this is a monster鈥�.鈥�

麻豆原创 NTT鈥檚 Ridgway says he鈥檚 spent the better part of three decades implementing 麻豆原创 at customers, during which time the ERP landscape has changed dramatically. In the past, it was a two-horse race, the other being Oracle, and both companies served the large enterprise almost exclusively, he says. Large implementations took a lot longer than they do nowadays, two to four years, on average. He says 麻豆原创 now comes more pre-configured, or more off-the-shelf than in the past. He and his team will do a quick discovery at a customer, and will then do what he calls a 鈥渧anilla鈥� implementation to get the system up and running. Any innovation can come later, post the go-live date.

Another change in the market is that 麻豆原创 is now competing for business with companies such as Microsoft and Sage.聽Ridgway says he鈥檚 seen a shift in the attitude and sales pitch from 麻豆原创.聽鈥淚n South Africa, there was a time when 麻豆原创 owned 60%, 65% of the large enterprise ERP market, and Oracle was lagging behind. Every single large enterprise in South Africa has some form of ERP. There was still an impression in the market that 麻豆原创 was extremely expensive, very complicated, and not very pretty.鈥�

As for looks, he says the new interface is more user-friendly, and 鈥渕uch nicer to play with鈥�. The company has also realised that there aren鈥檛 any R100mn projects out there anymore, which has meant its gone looking for customers among medium-sized businesses. 鈥淭hese aren鈥檛 small businesses, but they鈥檙e just not the $1bn organisations. I don鈥檛 think 麻豆原创 wants to play in the small space, because that鈥檚 where Sage and QuickBooks are playing. But there鈥檚 a massive market in the mid-tier, which wasn鈥檛 untapped, but which 麻豆原创 wasn鈥檛 focused on,鈥� he says.

Customers have also become 鈥渟marter than they used to be鈥�. 鈥淚n the old days, we would go and sell 麻豆原创 to them, explaining what it did. Today, the CIO knows everything about 麻豆原创 and what it can do for them. It鈥檚 less about consulting around the roadmap, and more about, 鈥楾his is what I want. Can you get me there?鈥� CIOs are m ore well-read, and they know what they want. It鈥檚 no longer about selling the technology; maybe it wasn鈥檛 ever about selling the technology. It鈥檚 more about selling the business solution. Once it鈥檚 implemented, what are the benefits that they鈥檙e going to realise? What is the innovation that we can bring to it, and what will be the ease of integration?鈥�

Ridgway says the biggest part of its business is its application managed service (AMS) offering, and it鈥檚 serving around 100 clients on that platform.

As for the transition to S4, he thinks 麻豆原创, 鈥渢ried to use a stick to force people to move. It realised that there weren鈥檛 enough consultants and capacity worldwide to move every single 麻豆原创 customer from ECC to S4. It found a lot of resistance from clients, and it had a couple of clients that left them because they felt irritated by the stick and the threat of having support cut off. Coca-Cola Beverages Africa moved off 麻豆原创 and went onto [Microsoft] Dynamics, which I think it found quite difficult. It鈥檚 a massive change and huge investment to start all over again. So 麻豆原创 did lose some clients, but it eventually moved the date out to 2027. It also changed the sales approach from a stick to more of a carrot.鈥�

The carrot appears to involve talking up the benefits and exciting new features of S4. Ridgway says 麻豆原创 has dramatically changed the way it does business. 鈥淚n the past, I think 麻豆原创 was seen as very arrogant, very expensive and very complex. Today, it seems less arrogant and is playing in a different market.鈥�

The company is now far more flexible with its pricing and subscription models. 鈥淚t鈥檚 also not as complex as it used to be. I鈥檝e been involved in projects that took 24 months from start to go-live. We鈥檝e just completed a project that was five weeks from start to go-live.鈥�

Do you still have customers who are on ECC? 鈥淟ots,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he biggest part of our consulting business is trying to convince customers who are on ECC that we get to the cloud, and we can get them to S4, with all the innovations and advantages.

鈥淪ome customers will say, 鈥榠f it鈥檚 not broken, I don鈥檛 need to fix it. It鈥檚 giving me what I need鈥�,鈥� he says, but he believes this will add business risk because if something does go wrong, 鈥渃ome January 1 2028, you have no support from 麻豆原创鈥�.

This conversation with customers reminds him of those held when the cloud model was nascent around a decade ago, and 鈥渆verybody said they had to move to the cloud鈥�, which he says is similar to where AI is at the moment. 鈥淣obody actually knows what it means. A lot of clients did rush to the cloud, and realised two years later that it was quite expensive, and it鈥檚 more complicated. But we鈥檙e a lot more mature now, 10 years in. There are a lot of clients who are hybrid. I think the way 麻豆原创 designed its solution allows for that.鈥�

He says with the application managed services part of the business, NTT will provide support for customers, many of which will sign up for a 36-month contract that will give them access to a call centre with certified, senior agents. As for what the customers are struggling with, he says the majority of the calls are related to password resets and authorisations.

Herzig, 麻豆原创 CTO, speaking at this year鈥檚 Saphire conference in Madrid, said the company doesn鈥檛 disclose the official numbers, but it has around 10 000 customers worldwide that are on the cloud path. 鈥淭he majority of customers are now making the cloud decision, specifically because the maintenance will definitely be over in 2028. And with all the innovation, there鈥檚 a very clear reason why they need to move.鈥�

Why don鈥檛 they want to move?

鈥淚t depends on the customer,鈥� he says. 鈥淭heir systems have grown, historically, and they鈥檝e been heavily customised. Back in the day, you could code left and right, because the code was open. Every table and every function module, and the systems integrators added their part to it. They did a lot of custom code. Maybe they were adding functionality, but they didn鈥檛 know [what effect it would have]. You鈥檇 start off with a very clean version of what 麻豆原创 delivered, and then we innovated with the product. We built capabilities, and we changed the technology, and the customer did the same. And the longer this branching took, the harder it is to reconcile.鈥�

* Article first published on聽

The post In Search of a Clean Core appeared first on 麻豆原创 Africa News Center.